11: Elon Musk

I’ve Covered Politics for 50 Years. Here’s Why So Much Hinges on Electing Kamala Harris. Beirut, clearly, had been a civilized and sophisticated city; parts of it still were — and yet it was descending into the unthinkable. The lesson was stark: My American soul, my life experience, had assumed that civilization was a rock-solid given, especially in historic cultural and commercial centers like Beirut. But it wasn’t. It was a tenuous state of grace. It needed to be nurtured, protected. ............ we have been flirting, dangerously, with disorder and disunity in the Trump era. ........... Ms. Harris, who was trained in the rule of law, understands viscerally the importance of the stability that government provides. Donald Trump doesn’t. He has attempted to destroy our faith in the institutions that keep us safe — the courts, the F.B.I., the intelligence community, the diplomatic corps, the military, even our electoral process and, this week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. ............ Let’s focus just for a moment on the military: It is the template for the highest form of citizenship. It requires a solemn pledge to subsume your individuality to protect the greater good. According to his former chief of staff John Kelly, Mr. Trump has referred to service members as “suckers” and “losers” — though he has said that this was “a total lie.” The former president has absolutely no idea of the rigors the military requires, the notions of service and sacrifice. He is a stranger to the most basic requirements of a democracy................ Impediments do exist, of course, and bigotry will always be part of the human condition. But the liberal failure to acknowledge the steady progress toward a cosmopolitan, heterogeneous society has been as purposefully myopic as Mr. Trump’s fever dream that white America is under siege — most recently, by legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. .................. the great choice we’re facing: whether we’re ready to follow our destiny as a wondrously creative, inclusive democracy or crash on

the straitened delusions of antique white nativism

, an American tendency of long standing but always a losing one in the past. .............. he has become the emperor of the irrational, pursuing a dismal vision of “American carnage” at a moment when crime is down, illegal immigration is down, inflation is down and our economy is the envy of the world.

How Harris Can Finish Strong audiences “will not tune in to watch information.” They will “only tune in and stay tuned to watch drama.” ........... strong drama is built around intention and obstacle. The hero has to be seized by a strong, specific desire, and she needs to face a really big obstacle. ........... You don’t communicate your deepest desire when your campaign is run by a committee. ......... George W. Bush used to tell that story about struggling with alcohol and then coming to faith. ............ Nixon, who saw himself as the scrappy outsider perpetually facing establishment foes. ............ As the election went on, Obama gripped our attention by showing greater depths of himself. By contrast, I can think of only one time we learned something surprising about Harris during her short campaign — that she owns a gun. Otherwise, she seems to hold conventional Democratic postures on all things. That’s not gripping. ........... “A great way to reveal character is to show somebody in crisis.” In any great story there are moments when we think the hero faces near certain defeat but then flips the tables. That’s when we find out what she has inside. .......... hold-backism is a common disease in our politics. Mitt Romney is a first-class human being, but during his 2012 campaign, he held himself back. In 2016, Hillary Clinton held herself back. Al Gore was said to be charming in private but held himself back. ............ It’s understandable. So much is at stake. You’re surrounded by consultants and strategy memos. A candidate can lose herself within the machinery.

Kamala Harris Is Turning a Trump Tactic on Its Head Her particular Achilles’ heel — pointed out by her opponent, who, whatever his manifest unfitness for the job, does have a talent for identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities — is contained in the word “protection.” ........... As much as the Harris campaign promotes “joy,” the national mood radiates fear — of exposure, threat, bodily harm. How’s a woman supposed to protect us from that? .................. In the public sphere, as in the personal, he who would dominate offers to protect. Forty-seven years ago, the feminist philosopher Susan Rae Peterson identified the syndrome of the “male protection racket,” asking, “Since the state fails them in its protective function, to whom can women turn for protection?” She explained that “women make agreements with husbands or fathers (in return for fidelity or chastity, respectively) to secure protection. From whom do these men protect women? From other men, it turns out.” She continued: “There is a striking parallel between this situation and tactics used by crime syndicates who sell protection as a racket. The buyer who refuses to buy the protective services of an agency because he needs no protection finds out soon that because he refuses to buy it, he very definitely needs protection. Women are in the same position.” .............. Donald Trump has it figured out. “Sadly, women are poorer than they were four years ago,” he told a Pennsylvania rally in late September. Also: “less healthy,” “less safe on the streets” and “more stressed and depressed and unhappy.” In a part of his speech aimed explicitly at female voters, he added, “I will fix all of that and fast, and at long last this nation, and national nightmare, will end.” Women, he promised, “will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger.” Why? “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.” .................. Mr. Trump is a master of the protection racket. He takes the old domestic savior scam national. He’s running a Halloween campaign, leaping from behind every podium to yell “Boo!” to scare his base, male and female both, with any hobgoblin he can conjure — migrants who are “vicious monsters,” who are “poisoning the blood of our country” and who will “rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill the people of the United States of America,” “radical left thugs” who “live like vermin” and “steal and cheat on elections,” Democratic governors who want to “execute” babies after they’re born, liberal schools conducting a “brutal operation” to change a child’s gender. Mr. Trump and his running mate have conjured childless women whose only companions are feline and illegal immigrants dining on felines. To save us from these monsters, Mr. Trump proposes himself. .................... His protection, of course, is as mythical as the threats he manufactures. Violent crime is near a 50-year low. Homicides fell nearly 12 percent from 2022 to 2023, the largest single-year drop in six decades, and rape declined by more than 9 percent. Women — and especially never-married women — have made significant economic gains since 2019. As for stress, as the “Daily Show” comedian Desi Lydic remarked after Mr. Trump’s speech, “I love how he’s acknowledging that we’re stressed out, as though he’s not the one stressing us out.” ................... Many voters, especially men, perceive the prospect of being protected by a woman as a threat. In a society where men judge their worth by their ability to protect, being protected by a woman is seen as a disgrace, a stain on one’s honor. ............... Women are allowed to play the protector in one arena: as mothers. The vice-presidential contender Sarah Palin famously tried to market herself as the “mama grizzly” candidate and said in 2010 in a speech to the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, “You thought pit bulls were tough. Well, you don’t want to mess with the mama grizzlies.” It’s no coincidence that at the same time that the Trump campaign is leaning on the “protector” theme, it’s disparaging Ms. Harris because she’s not a mother. ................. With his “I am your protector” speech, Mr. Trump was baiting Ms. Harris to cast herself as a protector, knowing he’d have her in a bind. He is a wizard at rope-a-dope, issuing an outrageous assertion in order to goad a response that will trap his opponent. He cast doubt on Ms. Harris’s racial credentials as an invitation for her to come out as an identity warrior..................... For them, war’s the point, not victory — outrage, not outcomes, as victim cultures on both the right and the left amply demonstrate. ........... This is how recent Republican administrations have profited from their own incompetence. Their inability to provide real protection (from, say, Osama bin Laden) fed the public’s desire for a symbolic act (like the “defeat” of Saddam Hussein). George W. Bush’s failure at practical protection — to heed the multiple warnings that a catastrophic attack on American soil was in the works — allowed him to play to the hilt the role of symbolic protector. A political advocacy group backing Mr. Bush in 2004 against John Kerry, a decorated combat veteran, aired a multimillion-dollar TV spot in which a girl whose mother was killed on Sept. 11 declared of Mr. Bush, “He’s the most powerful man in the world, and all he wants to do is make sure I’m safe.” Mr. Trump has pulled a similar switcheroo on countless fronts, from trade to manufacturing to immigration to lost elections. ............... If Mr. Trump embodies the make-believe rescuer, the bombastic redeemer who speaks loudly while carrying a tiny stick, Ms. Harris is his levelheaded, no-nonsense opposite. Her record of public service and her utilitarian policy plans attest to workable fixes to actual dangers instead of the amplification of invented ones. ............... I want reasoned and stable governance, exemplified by a president whose lodestar is the well-being and security of her citizenry, not the bloodlust of his base. ........... In 1977, Ms. Peterson observed that, under the laws of the state, women are like the “victimized, unwilling clients of an organized protection racket, because they cannot turn to each other, being unorganized themselves.”

Is Google’s NotebookLM Going to Disrupt the Podcasting Industry? Especially if all it takes is 1 click to turn any content into podcast .......... NotebookLM is a personalized AI research assistant powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro, designed to make sense of complex information........... With just one click, it generates engaging “deep dive” discussions that summarize the key topics in your sources. ............ What’s even more impressive is how it transforms any piece of content, no matter how dry, by generating two AI hosts (one male and one female) who discuss the document’s contents in a podcast-style format.

The Trumpification of American policy
Elon Musk unveils Tesla’s ‘Cybercab,’ plans to bring autonomous driving tech to other models in 2025
BlackRock Hits $11.5 Trillion With Push into Private Markets BlackRock Inc. pulled in a record $221 billion of total client cash last quarter, pushing the world’s largest money manager to an all-time high of $11.5 trillion of assets as it seeks to become a one-stop shop for stocks, bonds and, increasingly, private assets.
Musk Is Going All In to Elect Trump Elon Musk is planting himself in Pennsylvania, has brought his brain trust to help and may even knock on doors himself........... In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the richest man in the world has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history. .......... He has effectively moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania, the place that he has recently told confidants he believes is the linchpin to Mr. Trump’s re-election. ........ He has relentlessly promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy to his 201 million followers on X ............. Above all, he is personally steering the actions of a super PAC that he has funded with tens of millions of dollars to turn out the vote for Mr. Trump, not just in Pennsylvania but across the country. He has even proposed taking a campaign bus tour across Pennsylvania and knocking on doors himself, in part to see how his money is being used. .......... Mr. Musk’s battle plan as he directs his efforts to elect Mr. Trump with the same frenetic energy and exacting demands that he has honed at his companies SpaceX, Tesla and X. ............. These days, in private conversations, Mr. Musk is obsessive, almost manic, about the stakes of the election and the need for Mr. Trump to win. He praises Mr. Trump’s courage under fire — he endorsed him on the night of the assassination attempt in Butler — and talks about how funny he is. One person who spoke recently to Mr. Musk recalled him saying, without any hint of irony, “I love Trump.” .......... Mr. Trump has privately used grand — and unverified — terms to describe what Mr. Musk is donating to the super PAC, telling one associate recently that the figure is $500 million. .............. But friends and colleagues say Mr. Musk is adopting the same strategy that he has used during other crises he has considered existential. Just as Mr. Musk worked late into the night as his companies teetered on the verge of catastrophe, tinkering with rocket designs at SpaceX, sleeping on a couch in the Tesla factory or making staff cuts at Twitter, Mr. Musk has deemed this an all-hands-on-deck moment. ........... And so, just as he recruited friends, family and trusted lieutenants to Twitter after he bought the company, Mr. Musk has done the same at America PAC, which he founded to help Mr. Trump. Most recently, Mr. Musk added Steve Davis, a former SpaceX engineer and the head of his tunneling company, to the group, with Mr. Davis reprising a sidekick role that he played after Mr. Musk’s takeover of Twitter. ........... “I’m not sure there is a precedent in modern history to how Musk has inserted himself into the presidential race,” said Benjamin Soskis, a historian of the ultrarich. ............. Mr. Musk, who once privately called Mr. Trump a “stone-cold loser,” possesses in abundance the things Mr. Trump values most: wealth, fame and a massive platform. ............. Mr. Musk initially supported Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for president and suggested that Mr. Trump should “sail into the sunset.” Mr. Trump replied that Mr. Musk begged on his knees for government subsidies. ............ ... After Mr. DeSantis flamed out of the Republican primary, Mr. Musk began to tell friends that he wanted to find a way to support Mr. Trump — secretly. .............. He dismissed the power of television advertising and spoke sweepingly of an organic movement to elect Mr. Trump, with supporters persuading others to join the cause. Two voters by two voters — that was how Mr. Trump would win, he said. ............... Mr. Trump has made clear that he appreciates the help, promising to appoint Mr. Musk to oversee a government-efficiency team if he is re-elected. ............ At a rally in Reading, Pa., on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump appeared preoccupied with Mr. Musk, telling stories about his talks with Mr. Musk in three unrelated tangents and celebrating the “dark MAGA” hat that some attendees said they had bought because Mr. Musk wore it in Butler. .................. After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account............... At the core of Mr. Musk’s project is America PAC, an organization that the Trump campaign is relying on for significant help in knocking on doors in battleground states and encouraging 800,000 to one million voters to cast ballots for the former president. ........... The group has spent about $80 million to help Mr. Trump according to federal records, primarily on its canvassing program. Mr. Musk’s advisers have told donors that the group has about 2,500 organizers in the field, and the group has effectively acquired the Wisconsin assets of another group, Turning Points USA, taking on about 200 new canvassers in the state. Some canvassers, during training, have been shown Mr. Musk’s social media posts about the group, as a way to encourage them. .............. The Trump campaign is conducting something of an experiment by outsourcing portions of its voter contact operation to America PAC and other groups. That is possible because of new federal election guidance that allows political campaigns to coordinate their activities more closely with outside organizations. .............. Some donors to the super PAC have groused that Mr. Musk is relying on the same team that formed the core of Mr. DeSantis’s advisers when he attempted a similar effort in the Republican primaries, to no avail. ............. Veterans of past campaigns argue that canvassing operations generally take months or even years to become effective machines. There is little precedent for successfully standing up a group of this scale just months before a presidential election. ................ Since publicly endorsing the former president in July, he has posted at least 109 times about Mr. Trump and the election. And while he has said in the past that the platform should be “politically neutral,” he has used it to advance election misinformation and the baseless claim that Democrats are engaging in “deliberate voter importation” and “fast-tracking” immigrants to citizenship to gain control over the electorate. ..................... “Unless Trump wins and we get rid of the mountain of smothering regulations (that have nothing to do with safety!), humanity will never reach Mars,” Mr. Musk wrote this month in a post that has gained nearly 18 million views. “This is existential.” ................. In an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, he acknowledged “trashing Kamala nonstop” and being all in for Mr. Trump. ......... If Mr. Trump loses, he joked, “how long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?”

When The Arctic Melts



Grappling With the Talmud in the Midst of Crisis What the words of ancient rabbis could and couldn’t teach me. ............. Daf Yomi — the practice of reading a page of the Talmud every day over the course of seven and a half years .......... that famously dense compilation of arguments among ancient rabbis. ........... The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, is Judaism’s foundational holy book, but it’s not a cohesive manual for daily life. That’s where the Talmud comes in. A 63-volume collection of interpretation, storytelling and debate ............ Less-observant Jews, like me, often regard it with mystification and awe, leaving the studying to our more orthodox cousins. .......... before I started Daf Yomi, my relationship with the actual texts behind all that culture and history was superficial at best. .......... I started receiving my Daf Yomi emails just before the pandemic. As the world locked down, that “daily dose of Talmud” gave structure and meaning to an otherwise blank expanse of days. I found an unexpected joy in the Talmud’s humanity and community-minded ethic. ................ But the most important lessons, for me at least, were in the ritual of reading. It became transformative, returning day after day to the same debates, doing my best to engage with a text that for over a thousand years has instructed Jews in the importance of productive argument and paying careful attention to even the smallest of details, like marriage rites or what to do with an unruly ox. Though the Talmud is an ancient text, steeped in the mores of a very different world, the underlying values don’t feel so foreign to me. The rabbis were almost always guided by a sense of fairness and justice, an urge to protect the most vulnerable and to preserve the sanctity of human life. This last principle is encapsulated in a Talmudic maxim that, in its earliest iteration, reads: “Whoever destroys a single life is considered by scripture to have destroyed the whole world.” ............... “That which is hateful to you do not do to another,” he said. “That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Go study.” ............ the Talmud itself was born of crisis, compiled at a moment of catastrophe. Following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., Jews were forced to reimagine their religion without the temple that had for centuries served as its center. All those arguments on subjects like whether adjoining rooftops constitute public or private space serve a larger goal: a radical reimagining of practice and faith, a new way of thinking about personhood, mutual responsibility and coexistence. That process of rebuilding and rethinking continues even now, with every person who grapples with the text. ................ even in the most profound crisis, it’s possible to imagine new ways of being, new political structures, new models of coexistence and mutual support. In fact, this is when the reimagining is most urgent.